“Let me briefly remind you of the leading principles of this new
     philosophy.

“All knowledge is experience of facts acquired by the senses.  The traditions of older philosophies have obscured our experience by mixing with it much that the senses cannot observe, and until these additions are discarded our knowledge is impure.  Thus metaphysics tell us that one fact which we observe is a cause, and another is the effect of that cause; but upon a rigid analysis, we find that our senses observe nothing of cause or effect:  they observe, first, that one fact succeeds another, and, after some opportunity, that this fact has never failed to follow—­that for cause and effect we should substitute invariable succession.  An older philosophy teaches us to define an object by distinguishing its essential from its accidental qualities:  but experience knows nothing of essential and accidental; she sees only that certain marks attach to an object, and, after many observations, that some of them attach invariably, whilst others may at times be absent....  As all knowledge is relative, the notion of anything being necessary must be banished with other traditions."[11]

There is much here that expresses the spirit of the “New Philosophy,” if by that term be meant the spirit of modern science; but I cannot but marvel that the assembled wisdom and learning of Edinburgh should have uttered no sign of dissent, when Comte was declared to be the founder of these doctrines.  No one will accuse Scotchmen of habitually forgetting their great countrymen; but it was enough to make David Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within earshot of his house, an instructed audience should have listened, without a murmur, while his most characteristic doctrines were attributed to a French writer of fifty years later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss alike the vigour of thought and the exquisite clearness of style of the man whom I make bold to term the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century—­even though that century produced Kant.

But I did not come to Scotland to vindicate the honour of one of the greatest men she has ever produced.  My business is to point out to you that the only way of escape out of the crass materialism in which we just now landed, is the adoption and strict working-out of the very principles which the Archbishop holds up to reprobation.

Let us suppose that knowledge is absolute, and not relative, and therefore, that our conception of matter represents that which it really is.  Let us suppose, further, that we do know more of cause and effect than a certain definite order of succession among facts, and that we have a knowledge of the necessity of that succession—­and hence, of necessary laws—­and I, for my part, do not see what escape there is from utter materialism and necessarianism.  For it is obvious that our knowledge of what we call the material world, is, to begin with, at least as certain and